The Truth About Fiction and Non-fiction

Let me tell you a little secret

Not many people know this little secret. I did not learn about it until I was in my late twenties, a hundred years ago. I now suddenly feel compelled to share this secret.

You see, there is no such thing as ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction.’ Those are terms that were made up by bookstore owners as a way to categorize and organize their inventory. That is all that it is.

There is some non-fiction in every work of fiction. And there is some fiction in every work of non-fiction. Nothing is pure fiction and nothing is pure non-fiction. All writings contain parts of both.

But we humans do not like that. We need everything to be concrete; separated, delineated and categorized. We need to separate fiction and non-fiction in our heads in order to keep our thoughts organized and know what to believe.

Those darn bookstore owners played right into that. They knew we humans like to be entertained and we also want to know ‘the truth.’ Keeping those two desires separate helps keep us from getting confused.

When we read a book or a story or an article we need to know if something is ‘true’ or not. Our brains need to know how to categorize everything. So we read with expectations based on what part of the bookstore we…